Substantive Scientific Editing

Substantive Scientific Editing

Our most granular author service seeks to overhaul the style of scholarly work. Many of our clients are extremely grateful for this heavier editing service, which works with complex data and renders scholarship into a native-sounding style, with the tone, diction, and clarity of scholarly English. Substantive scientific editing elevates work to a publishable standard, dramatically improving readability and imparting work with elegance and flair. This service includes rendering all citations complete and properly formatted. We will also retrieve all missing bibliographic information.

Through our careful interventions, we can elevate and overhaul the scholarly register of any manuscript, helping to engage your reader as effectively as possible with your ideas, whether you are working in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics. We also relish editing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. With our substantive scientific editing service, a PhD-educated subject expert will bond with your manuscript, making suggestions and emendations that reflect a deep understanding of your ideas, as well as your target readership. In so doing, the editor will help to clarify the respective components of your argument, reconstructing the text (where necessary) to foreground the originality of the content and crystallise your authorial voice.

According to the published research (Flowerdew, 2001), major obstacles to academic publication at the highest level include the absence of a strong authorial voice and parochialism. Lex Academic’s substantive editing helps you surmount these barriers through a holistic approach that centrally involves transforming how one constructs and transmits a compelling, scholarly narrative.

We regularly work with authors following ‘revise and resubmit’ recommendations to ensure their papers hit the right notes the second time around. Our substantive edits are beautifully finished by our professional Quality Controller, Dr Jennifer Swift, from the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, whose intuitive interventions never fail to bring out the best in an author’s work. Dr Swift’s seal of approval to all work guarantees client satisfaction.

Substantive scientific editing can include editing tables, cutting documents down to an agreed length, as well as providing wholesale stylistic overhauls.

As part of substantive editing, we render your work consistent with regard to formatting and referencing style. To this end, we are conversant with the dominant citation styles for all STEM subjects (including ACS, AIP, AMA, APA, ASA, Chicago, CSE, Harvard, ICMJE, and IEEE). Furthermore, we readily familiarise ourselves with the peculiarities required by different university faculties for the sake of Ph.D. and DPhil submission. Just let us know your referencing style and spelling conventions (e.g., American or British English) and we can begin working our magic on your manuscript.

All changes to your text are logged through Microsoft Word’s Track Changes facility. This enables you to keep tabs on our interventions, giving you autonomy over the final draft of your work.

We also provide file conversion services and are able to edit LaTeX documents in Overleaf and PDF.

Can we help with anything else?

Ensure your entire manuscript is submission-ready with our extraordinary scientific Proofreading, Copy-Editing, and Substantive Editing. Our impeccable author services include correcting all typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors. Where desired, we can make stylistic and substantive changes to your work that promise a powerful first impression with major publishers. Our authors have published with all of the top-tier publishing houses, including Bloomsbury, Brill, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Penguin, Peter Lang, Princeton University Press, and Routledge.

Authors or publishers interested in our services should get in touch with our Managing Editor detailing their editorial requirements and publication ambitions.